Relation of infants' and mothers' pointing to infants' vocabulary measured directly and with parental reports.

Ertaş, Sura; Koşkulu-Sancar, Sümeyye; Ger, Ebru; Liszkowski, Ulf; Küntay, Aylin C (2023). Relation of infants' and mothers' pointing to infants' vocabulary measured directly and with parental reports. Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies, 28(6), pp. 1007-1029. Wiley 10.1111/infa.12558

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Infants' and parents' pointing gestures predict infants' concurrent and prospective language development. Most studies have measured vocabulary size using parental reports. However, parents tend to underestimate or overestimate infants' vocabulary necessitating the use of direct measures alongside parent reports. The present study examined whether mothers' index-finger pointing, and infants' whole-hand and index-finger pointing at 14 months associate with infants' receptive and expressive vocabulary based on parental reports and directly measured lexical processing efficiency (LPE) concurrently at 14 months and prospectively at 18 months. We used the decorated room paradigm to measure pointing frequency, the Turkish communicative development inventory I to measure infants' receptive vocabulary, Turkish communicative development inventory II to measure their expressive vocabulary, and the Looking-While-Listening (LWL) task to measure LPE. At 14 months, 34 mother-infant dyads, and at 18 months, 30 dyads were included in the analyses. We found that only infants' index-finger pointing frequency at 14 months predicted their LPE (both reaction time and accuracy) prospectively at 18 months but not concurrently at 14 months. Neither maternal pointing nor infants' pointing predicted their receptive and expressive vocabulary based on indirect measurement. The results extend the evidence on the relation between index-finger pointing and language development to a more direct measure of vocabulary.

Item Type:

Journal Article (Original Article)

Division/Institute:

07 Faculty of Human Sciences > Institute of Psychology
07 Faculty of Human Sciences > Institute of Psychology > Developmental Psychology

UniBE Contributor:

Ger, Ebru

Subjects:

100 Philosophy > 150 Psychology

ISSN:

1532-7078

Publisher:

Wiley

Language:

English

Submitter:

Pubmed Import

Date Deposited:

04 Sep 2023 10:36

Last Modified:

12 Oct 2023 00:15

Publisher DOI:

10.1111/infa.12558

PubMed ID:

37655834

BORIS DOI:

10.48350/185992

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/185992

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